Social Responsibility (EDUC 639)

A Google search for social responsibility yielded 949 million results which indicate people are writing about and exploring the term social responsibility. Digging deeper and creating my definition of social responsibility involves how individuals cooperate and ethically interacts with society. Educators have a huge part to play in equipping learners to understand social responsibility.

            According to Dunn and Doolittle (2020), the teaching personal and social responsibility (TPSR) model encourages behavior modification and relationship-building as the start to teaching social responsibility. Additionally, they suggested incorporating service-learning into courses to model social responsibility.

            To prepare learners for society outside of the classroom, educators should model socially responsible behavior and allow students to demonstrate socially responsible behavior by incorporating opportunities  in the curriculum (Richards et al., 2020). Another example educators could model for students is to make sure their electronic footprint reflects the same standards they would hold their students.  Ensuring the electronic footprint is uplifting and encouraging is one way to model behavior. Even if an educator thinks their social media page is private, there are so many ways that a so-called private post becomes public (Fagell, 2018).

            Richards et al. (2020) suggest allowing students opportunities to learn by doing and get feedback and correction along the way.  Educators are not the only ones responsible for modeling socially responsible behavior, so are parents and other adults in society. The more students witness socially responsible behavior, the more equipped and empowered they will be to carry out that same behavior.
 
Reference
Dunn, R. J., & Doolittle, S. A. (2020). Professional development for teaching personal and social responsibility: Past, present, and future. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 39(3), 347-356.

Fagell, P. L. (2018, October). Teachers and social media: A cautionary tale about the risks. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(2), 68. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A562866823/BIC?u=vic_liberty&sid=BIC&xid=e9071403

Richards, K. A. R., Jacobs, J. M., Ivy, V. N., & Lawson, M. A. (2020). Preservice teachers perspectives and experiences teaching personal and social responsibility. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 25(2), 188-200.